Following the Asian financial crisis in 1997-98, a number of Asian central banks adopted inflation targeting. While it is possible for the average inflation rate to be close to target, deviations of inflation could nevertheless be large and protracted. We therefore explore how successful this...

This paper studies the term structure of short-term interbank rates in Hong Kong. Principal components analysis suggests that the variation of the term structure can be largely attributed to two components which capture shifts in the level and slope of the yield curve. We find that term spreads...

Starting in the early 1990s, several emerging market and transition economies (EMEs) have adopted inflation targeting (IT). In this paper we discuss a number of issues that arise in this context: (a) the definition of IT, (b) the role of preconditions for IT, (c) the use of intermediate exchange...

This paper studies the relationship between residential property prices and lending in Hong Kong. This is an interesting topic for three reasons. First, swings in property prices have been extremely large and frequent in Hong Kong. Second, under the currency board regime, monetary policy can not...

This paper estimates output gaps for Hong Kong, Korea, the Philippines, Singapore and Taiwan, employing the HP filter and unobservable-components (UC) techniques. The latter approach assumes that actual output is the sum of potential output, which follows a random walk with a time-varying drift,...